Such disorders compelled their own cure in their own country. Although they flooded Europe with opinions at war with beliefs, and upheld a cosmopolitan model, they brought the French a deliverer who declined into a despot. Personality avenged herself. And the eventual remedy for Napoleonism has in its turn been found in a Republic which, discarding the sovereignty of man, has also discarded the sovereignty of God.
The effects of such a government are best perceived in two recent and remarkable books, M. Demolin’s “À quoi tient la Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons,” and M. Cerfberr’s “Essai sur le Mouvement Social et Intellectuel en France depuis 1789.” The perpetual preponderance of the bourgeoisie has raised a bureaucracy. The Charter of the Revolution has culminated in middle-class officialism. The over-centralisation of government by a few groups, who do not represent the varied elements of a great nation, has caused a dearth of individual initiative, a lack of personal self-reliance and social free-play, a tendency towards the withering dictatorship of state-socialism, which underlies the unfitness of France for colonisation, and which both these acute thinkers depict and deplore; while the late Professor Mommsen, commenting on Cæsar’s union of Democracy with Empire, employs the same arguments.
That state which best represents national character enjoys the freest play of institutions, favours the finest shape of spirit, public and private, will wield the most formative influence among nations, expand the most easily, and propagate itself by expansion. And the state which best embodies the national will, is where the legislature is in keenest touch with the executive, where institutions are organic, where representation is popular, and where centralisation is foreign to the national genius. This has, unfortunately, never been realised in France. She was centralised to an amazing degree long before her memorable outburst; and De Tocqueville has well shown that her attempts to unite judicial with legislative functions were the surest signs of her lack of “solidarity.” Her great upheaval was predicted by Bolingbroke more than forty years before it occurred, just because he discerned that her ancient constitution ignored a popular representation. De Tocqueville himself, too, only proves that the aristocratic centralisation of old France has been replaced by the collectivist centralisation of its new democracy. Both in spirit are the same. Centralisation, whatever its forms, precludes the fair and free distribution of activities. It hoards and absorbs the national character. These are its original sins. But Disraeli has also pointed out that, for many reasons, France remains the sole ancient country that can afford to begin again.
So much for the “Rights of Man.” One word still on “the Sovereignty of the People.”
“A people,” said Disraeli, as early as 1836, in his Spirit of Whiggism, “is a species; a civilised community is a nation. Now a nation is a work of art and a work of time. A nation is gradually created by a variety of influences.... These influences create the nation—these form the national mind.... If you destroy the political institutions which these influences have called into force, and which are the machinery by which they constantly act, you destroy the nation. The nation, in a state of anarchy and dissolution, then becomes a people; and after experiencing all the consequent misery, like a company of bees spoiled of their queen and rifled of their hive, they set to again and establish themselves into a society....”
“The People” is a phrase of physiology, not of politics. It is an abstruse name for a multitude; it ignores temperament and will. Stripped of its high sound, its “Sovereignty” means government by miscellany, the censorship of the census. Its political bearings are as purely arithmetical as are the corresponding ethical bearings of the Utilitarian creed; for they both disregard the many-sided nature of man. Although derived from the speculations of some late seventeenth-century republicans in England, the French application of the theory—Burke’s “Wisdom told by the Head”—was entirely new. It was not republicanism, the government by qualified members of ordered classes: it was a despotism by the crowd as crowd. Such a “Democracy” has never been the permanent scheme of government in any nation, although “Liberal opinion” has relied too often on its simplicity. “One man, one vote,” quantity instead of quality is in truth no principle at all; and this attempt to confuse the Book of Wisdom with the Book of Numbers is a feat reserved for modern periods alone. All earlier systems of democracy were more or less discriminate, for no indiscriminate state can cohere, and both freedom and order are based on discrimination. The Attic Democracy demanded a degraded class of unleisured, unemancipated slaves. The American Republic, which has freed serfs and abolished leisure, possesses a peculiar stability, which will outwear its occasional corruption because it exists through a landed democracy—one impossible in overcrowded Europe—as we shall find Disraeli emphasising in my American chapter.
In a word, the logical outcome of the “Sovereignty of the People” is the tyranny of plebiscite. But a “plebiscite” dispenses with the very principle of representation, for where all decide equally, why should any be represented? Political power exercisable by all can only arise when all are sufficiently qualified. But it is always the some, never the all, who are competent. Even in their proper sphere of merely personal choice, how false and fatal most plebiscites have proved!—“Not this man, but Barabbas.”
Vox populi is only vox Dei through the gradual institutions that nations create; not through the wayward moods and momentary clamours of “the people.” The whole problem is how at once to range and to raise public opinion—the popular conscience; how to preserve moral, without retarding material, progress; how to inspire “progress” itself with the conviction that it consists in following the highest leadership; how, again, to ensure such leadership by the constant association of duty with privilege, and responsibility with power; how to recruit it by every means that the spread of enlightenment can furnish.
“On man alone the fate of man is placed,”
sang Disraeli, in the Revolutionary Epick; and of “opinion”—